Blazehgehg

I feel like this is a pretty classic story of good people doing bad things, but it really has to be said that the characters themselves are what make this movie. In a lot of these kinds of stories, you're dealing with scumbags.

Not so, here. Christian Slater's Clarence really does seem like a nice guy -- at one point he describes himself as a "minimum wage kid" and that's exactly who he is. He's genuinely cute with his call-girl-turned-wife Alabama. They aren't crooks. Every step of the way, you're rooting for them to succeed against the horrors of organized crime, even as they make every mistake in the book along the way.

Surprisingly stacked cast. Christopher Walken, Samuel L. Jackson, Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini... Lots of names that come in for one scene, get a couple minutes of screen time, and are never seen again. Including an almost completely unrecognizable Gary Oldman as a dreadlock-swinging slur-slinging pimp named Drexl Spivy.

Actually, kind of a lot of slurs in this movie. If it's any consolation, mostly from cops. 1993, huh?

Still, had a good time with it.

I am going to be real with you: this movie actually, literally, put me to sleep. I remember the first 30 minutes or so pretty clearly, up until meeting Shinzon, Picard's evil clone. After that it becomes a blur of trying and failing to replicate the magic of Wrath of Khan.

This hits a lot of the same notes these Trek movies go for. Picard's clone is obviously meant to be at least 20 years younger than he is, putting the captain's age into question.

We have a big action set pieces, like early on we're privy to some kind of Mad Max scene, where the Away Team is down on the planet's surface driving a buggy and shooting guns at marauders. It's supposed to be cool and exciting, in a franchise that's mainly a submarine allegory, where you spend most of your time in a confined space looking at radar screens. Wrath of Khan knew this and made the strategy element of that fun! But now we have to have crazy stunts, guns, and explosions.

This is just Patrick Stewart mumbling gravely to his crew while they continue to mine Data (and Data's new brother, B4) for as many "fish out of water" jokes as they can. Haha, he thinks he's people! But he's not! And that's where the funny is!

I'll at least give them this: for 2002, a lot of the CGI in this movie still looks pretty good, I think. The special effects in some of these movies can be really hit or miss, but it seems to hold up pretty well here. This was the same year as Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and that movie can feel like watching a cutscene in a Playstation 2 game. Nemesis is a lot more smart and subtle with its use of CGI and I rather enjoyed it.

Beyond that, this seems to be two hours of stereotypical "We aren't so different, you and I" navel gazing and little else.

This was a movie I wanted to see as a kid. I would have been about 13 when this came out. My mom sternly refused to rent it; she thought it looked really, really dumb. She knew of the 1977 version, I think even the 1932 version, and said "It'll never work."

Guess what? This movie IS really, really dumb!

The costumes are silly. The drama is corny. It's almost, but not quite campy. Taken as a whole, it's laughable, predictable, and a little bit boring.

It's like, imagine Jurassic Park, with none of the wonder, none of the heart, none of the amazing technology, and when we arrive at the island, things were already a horrifying disaster and only continued to get worse.

A strange, miserable, ugly, stupid movie.